Notes on Wars During My Lifetime

Other works sit more comfortably within fine art practice. A simple idea with high impact is Wars During my Lifetime by Martin John Callanan, which lists on newsprint all the wars that have taken place during his lifetime. There are 189 of them and he is only 30 years old.

This new work for Whitstable Biennale 2012, Wars During My Lifetime, collects together wars that have taken place all over the world during one individual’s lifetime. A fascinating – and rapidly expanding – document, the newspaper makes no comment, but quietly brings the list to our attention. Many are wars we hear about on the radio on a daily basis, others are long since finished, or so small or distant they haven’t touched our consciousness.

A solo exhibition across six spaces at Casal Solleric, the city of Palma’s contemporary art gallery and archive, including two new works.

Ten years in the making, and shown here for the fist time, Grounds, an archive of thousands of photographs of the ground in locations important to society. A set of 200 displayed across three slide projectors.

Wars During My Life Time, a new work for this exhibition, a newspaper listing – in Catalan – all wars fought during my lifetime.

I Wanted to See All of the News From Today, amasses from across the internet, the front pages of over 960 newspapers from around the world and displays these images within the space of a single scrolling display.

Text Trends, an animation which takes the content generated by search queries and reduces this process to its essential elements: search terms vs. frequency searched for over time, presented in the form of a line graph.